Climbing, whether you’re watching a movie or actually doing it, is always a thrill. Our favorite climbing movies look so spectacularly dangerous, we feel exhilarated even when we're sitting on the couch. All these films are based on real stories from real people, which makes these films even more impressive.

Touching the Void (2003)
This heart-stopping film is a reenactment of two mountaineers' experience of climbing the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Narrated by the two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, the plot focuses on how Simpson broke his leg and then (spoiler alert!) miraculously survived a long fall, only to make it back to base camp despite all the obstacles. It’s guaranteed that you will hold your breath the entire time, in disbelief that this is a true story and that Simpson actually survived.

July 12, 2013

As Sloan, she played the love interest on HBO's rabidly popular Entourage, and now she portrays Lorelei on The Mentalist. In her free time, actress Emmanuelle Chriqui is an environmental activist: She helps plant school gardens in low-income neighborhoods, takes life-changing trips to places like Africa, and, since 2007, has helped run the Environmental Media Association, which promotes eco-efforts in the entertainment industry. Read on to find out how her path toward greenness was paved with persistent throat infections and homemade apple tarts.

What made you get
involved with the Environmental Media Association?

Years ago, I was shopping for a new car and was excited about the Prius. Someone put me in touch with Debbie Levin, the president of EMA. We hit it off famously. She saw my inclination toward living a natural life and asked if I'd be interested in joining. I’d already started doing stuff
that was important to me on my own, but the association is amazing because it
uses the media to create awareness. I was coming off Entourage, and there was sort of a lot of heat at that time, so I
thought I could add something. I’ve been working with them ever since.

“The F-word isn’t in the dark anymore,” says Josh Fox, the director, writer, and narrator of the anti-fracking film Gasland Part II at the beginning of the deeply unsettling second installment of the Gasland series. The activist/filmmaker resides in the home his father built the year he was born. Located along the Delaware River, the area has been riddled with natural gas drilling operations, making Fox the perfect person to tell the tale of fracking and the shroud of mystery that surrounds it. His home is in the foreground of this brewing debate as it sits above the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit, also known by the infamous nickname “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.”

The film is an eye-opening case study of towns and counties all over the country impacted by fracking and its side effects. Places like Dimock, PA, Dallas- Fortworth, TX, Pavillion, WY, and even Los Angeles take center stage as they happen to be unfortunate enough to be located over the natural gas deposits that opened the floodgates for natural gas extraction. Fox uses chilling visuals like children playing in open drill fields, notorious flaming water hoses that one resident says “never fail to light,” and laundry lists of unpronounceable chemicals that are found in these peoples water supplies. Hearing the disastrous symptoms and conditions of locals in these communities only prolongs the documentary's lasting impact on its viewers.

June 14, 2013

With Father's Day just around the corner, it's time to shine light on some of the best fathers in the animal kingdom. From tigers to penguins, each animal takes care of their offspring in a different manner: some like to play fight, some hold dedicated watch over young, while others believe in tough love.

Check out our collection of wildlife videos below and find out which award we give to each animal dad.

Trendsetter DadThis is the first male tiger (known to humans) that takes care of his young ones. That's why we applaud this striped beauty for breaking the norm and getting in touch with his sensitive side.

June 03, 2013

This documentary project brings a whole new meaning to the term “trashy music.”

Landfill Harmonic is a movie-in-the-making about “The Recycled Orchestra,” a children’s orchestra in a Paraguayan shantytown that plays instruments made completely from garbage. In Cateura, Paraguay, a slum located atop a landfill site, there are few prospects for children living in extreme poverty.

According to orchestra director Favio Chavez, “There were a lot of drugs, alcohol, violence, child labor — a lot of situations that you wouldn’t think are favorable for kids to learn values.”

However, the formation of this orchestra allows the children of this community to have a creative outlet through their hostile, polluted environment. This film has not only given children the chance to learn and grow through music, but also allows them to transform waste into something beautiful.

May 31, 2013

A River Changes Course is an eloquent, dispassionate
departure from environmental documentaries as polemics against our sins.

The film quietly follows three Cambodian people whose lives
are repetitive, physical, and hard. Yet filmmaker Kalyanee Mam seems interested
in capturing the perspectives of individuals operating within a developing
nation, not steering any conversation that may follow. The film has no voice over, with sparse dialogue translated
via subtitles, and a score that yields to the quotidian sounds of winnowing
rice or the buzz of a sewing machine.

Mam wordlessly trails Sari Math operating a skiff as he
fishes with his father, Khieu Mok, grinning as she learns to operate a sewing
machine, and Sav Samourn bathing with her children in a pool of clay-colored
water.

Math — often shown sprawled on the floor, scribbling in a
notebook — later leaves his family to work on a cassava plantation. Fish
catches are dwindling, and Math’s father pushes him to the plantation to earn money
for the family.

May 30, 2013

Watching the documentary Terra Blight on a
laptop (and a few hours after buying a new smartphone) certainly underscored
the film’s point that the first world abounds with computers. The film also raises a question we rarely ask — what happens to all these electronic
devices when we’re through with them?

The disturbing — but upon
reflection, not too surprising — answer: they are often dumped in a country far, far
away. In just 55 minutes, the film follows the life cycle of computers, particularly their frequent demise in dumpsites like one profiled in Ghana.

Kids frequent the dumpsites
to find materials to sell in order to pay for school. They also go to play. Children
frolic amid small heaps of burning electronic debris and hill-size mounds of
old computers. Wearing flip-flops, shorts, and T-shirts, they pick through the
piles with bare hands.

Among the facts listed between
scenes throughout the film: “Soil sampled at the dumpsite had 67 times more
lead than the U.S. EPA’s limit for direct residential exposure.”

May 29, 2013

The
recent documentary Elemental captures the environmental movement in amber — a pretty, present-day artifact of people trying to preserve our planet. The film doesn’t portend doom, nor reassure that good
intentions will prevail; it’s more about human interaction than ecological
destruction.

Elemental
profiles Canadian activist Eriel Deranger in her campaign against the Keystone
XL pipeline, Indian government official Rajendra Singh in his nationwide tour
to galvanize citizens to clean up the Ganges river, and Australian inventor Jay
Harman in his quest to get funding for biomimetic solutions to combatting
climate change.

For
all three, the biggest hurdle is not any ecological destruction itself (though there are looming aerial shots of the tar sands’ churned earth and yawning gray landscape, and a close-up
of trash clotted on the banks of the sludgy brown river), but in
rousing people to join their causes.

May 28, 2013

Milestone
birthdays can trigger the kind of big life decisions that make great fodder for
movies. So, almost-30-year-old Christopher Smith stumbled into making a
documentary about building a 130-square-foot home and the big-picture ethos
behind the tiny house movement: Tiny.

Wrestling with
those “Who do I want to be? How do I want to live?” questions on the cusp of his 30th spurred Smith’s impetuous
purchase of a wide open space in Colorado. He just needed to put a house on it. In the pursuit of freedom, self-sufficiency, and in the interest of completing a DIY-home without any construction experience, he decided to build a tiny one.

As the
project took shape, Smith’s girlfriend and co-builder Merete Mueller suggested
they make a mini-movie about it. Two years and a successful Kickstarter
campaign later, Tiny is now hitting the film-festival circuit as a
full-length feature.

Tiny
shows Smith starting and stumbling, learning to build his house from
scratch — a smart phone playing an
instructional video that directs him as he wires the house for electricity, a
laptop playing an instructional video that directs him as he sews curtains for
the windows.

November 19, 2012

Chasing Ice is one of the most hauntingly beautiful, yet at the same time, socially disturbing films that you'll see this year. Brought to life by the same producer as The Cove, this documentary tells the story of climate change through the eyes, and lens, of photographer James Balog and a team of experts and interns who form the Extreme Ice Survey.

Watch as massive glaciers dissolve from the landscape, rivers of runoff slice through the arctic ice, and witness with your own eyes as the team catches the biggest calving event ever recorded. Combining both stunning visuals of glacial melt, alongside alarming statistics on the affects that global warming are having on the frigid landscape in Greenland, Alaska, Montana, and Iceland; this film will make even the harshest critic stand up and take notice of the drastic changes happening around us.

Aside from the visual aspects of the film, Balog's dedication to telling this story is truly inspiring. Toughing it out through multiple knee surgeries, even going as far as using crutches just to climb out and stay close to the action, shows a thirst for knowledge. To see that perseverance in Balog, and his crew, through personal and technical struggles, to share this story with the world is astounding.

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